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Debian is my favorite distro for web dev, but, MIPS is also near and dear to my heart since I learned its hardware architecture in college. I view MIPS as the
by zackmorris 6y ago
Debian is my favorite distro for web dev, but, MIPS is also near and dear to my heart since I learned its hardware architecture in college.
I view MIPS as the simplest possible instruction set that satisfies most of the modern scalability constraints (RISC, short pipeline, etc). It will likely be replaced by something like ARM which also incorporates instruction compression for basically free (since memory latency matters more than computing power more with each passing year).
So I'm sad to see them remove MIPS support since I think next-gen 16+ core processors will probably use it. But, after reviving more failing projects than I can count, it's not a huge deal to use old commits to re-implement functionality. Most of that work is probably around stuff like endianness issues, atomic instructions, protected memory, caching, etc etc etc. If it helps them to set it aside for now, great, but I hope that MIPS support returns someday is all I'm saying.
- hlieberman 6y agoMIPS (Little Endian) and MIPS64 (LE) are still fully supported architectures!
- abrowne 6y agoAre you sure for mips? It says (emphasis added) > We have decided that the architectures that will be part of the bullseye release are: amd64, arm64, armel, armhf, i386, mips64el, mipsel, ppc64el and s390x (i.e. the same we had for buster minus mips).
- SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago"mips64el, mipsel" Those are MIPS, but Little-Endian instead of Big-Endian.
- abrowne 6y agoThanks, got it now, I was confused by the differing notations. (I thought the parenthetical was a description, not a name.) Listening to my MIPS internet radio now FWIW (Pure brand).
- ohazi 6y ago> It will likely be replaced by something like ARM Er... the spiritual successor to MIPS (as "that nice little instruction set that academics love") is definitely RISC-V, not ARM, and a Debian port for riscv64 is in progress.
- ncmncm 6y agoMIPS has no SMP memory model. One could be cribbed from POWER or ARM, or even x86, but it is a paste-up.
- pezezin 6y agoI don't know about SMP, but back in the day SGI built NUMA machines with hundreds of MIPS cores.
- jabl 6y agoWell, SGI used to make those huge shared memory NUMA machines based on MIPS (then they switched to IA-64, after that x86-64, and then they got bought by HPE). But yes, I guess that's far enough back in time that they didn't have any formal model for the behavior. I guess they had some kind of prose specification, and then they just winged it.
- ncmncm 6y agoMy recollection (from discussion with an engineer on that project) was that they were using Itanium there. They used Itanium in preference to amd64 because amd64 had one fewer address pin than they memory they wanted to put on needed.
- jabl 6y agoThey sold multiple generations of these huge NUMA machines. First were the MIPS-based Origin 2000 and 3000 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Origin_2000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Origin_2000 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Origin_3000_and_Onyx_3000#Origin_3000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Origin_3000_and_Onyx_3000#... ) supporting up to 512 CPU's running Irix, then came the Itanium-based Altix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altix ) with up to 4096 cores running Linux, then finally the x86-64 based Altix UV supporting up to 2048 cores, also running Linux.
- pabs3 6y agoDebian can always use more porters, especially for MIPS as that family of ports isn't doing great. The debian-mips mailing list should be able to help you get involved and there are similar lists and IRC channels for other ports, as well as the #debian-ports IRC channel for all the unofficial ports.